It all started with the Chronicles of Narnia
I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe first. Then, several years later I read The Magicians Nephew: a far darker tale. Yet I'd seen Narnia's future, that gave it depth. Turning Narnia from a place into a World, a Universe. And I loved it. I read all but two of remaining chronicles in some random order over a period of years. More years... I reread the whole series when I was given the entire set, a new edition with "better" cover-art, when it was discovered I'd missed two whole books. The spine of each book was numbered. This clearly showed The Magicians Nephew was to be read first. Yet I found that something was missing. It didn't feel right.
For some forgotten reason I did some research into the ordering of the Chronicles and stumbled onto a bit of a controversy. Then, after a while, I realised that the whole question was moot. There may be an generally accepted order. But I could still pick any order I wished. No matter what order they were published in, no matter what order they were written in, no matter what the chronology. To me the order in which I'd first read these wonderful books was "The Right Way". So that's the order I will always read them in: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, then The Magicians Nephew, then the rest.
Thinking with a wider scope I eventually decided that all narrative order can be treated as arbitrary. As a result, I was perfectly entitled to impose my own order. Specifically, I was perfectly entitled to read a single book with a threaded plot with any ordering I could devise. So I tried it with Lord of the Rings. When the fellowship dissolves Sam and Frodo head off to Mordor; Merry and Pippin get captured; Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli follow the captured hobbits. The story branches again when Pippin splits from Merry. There was nothing stopping me, I decided, from reading the "Pippin thread" first, then reading the rest later. So that's what I did.
From there it was just a small step to reading LOTR whilst leaving bits out. These days I usually skip The Council of Elrond, and indeed much that takes place in Rivendell. And Tom Bombadil - I've always felt he belongs in a totally different book. It's not that I don't read these bits, I do. On their own. Skipping the rest of the book.
I've tried it with other books since. And discovered a few problems: mainly that it can be annoying if you haven't read it, properly, recently. But on the whole I find it's a very good way to get more out of a familiar book. I'm perfectly aware literary purists will now be accusing me of heresy... but I don't care. I've discovered more re-reading books my way that I ever did re-reading in the conventional way. In the end that's what really matters. Isn't it?
Keyboard Hint
You would not believe the number of time I've had to reboot a headless FreeBSD server merely to get it to see the keyboard. Yet no matter how many times I've done it I've always forgotten to investigate a permanent fix.
Until now.
cd /boot cp device.hints device.hints.old cat device.hints | sed 's/atkbd.0.flags="0x1"/atkbd.0.flags="0x0"/' > device.hints
Only issue is that the keyboard lights don't. But I can live with that.
So easy. Is going to save me so much time. Now why the hell didn't I investigate sooner?